Agence France-Presse,
BOGOTA: Venezuela on Sunday dispatched troops to its border with Colombia and closed its embassy in Bogota, as tensions escalated sharply Sunday over Colombia's cross-border raid into Ecuador that killed a top Colombian rebel.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he was sending troops to his country's border with Colombia, as tensions mounted over Bogota's military strike on a jungle base in Ecuador.
Speaking on his weekly television broadcast, Chavez said he would be sending “10 battalions to the border with Colombia” and that he had put the air force on stand by.
“We don't want war,” said Chavez, but the president said he would not allow Saturday's cross border attacks to go unchallenged.
Ecuadoran President Rafael “Correa can count on Venezuela, no matter what for whatever it needs,” said Chavez.
He added: “I'm ordering the immediate withdrawal of all our personnel from the embassy in Bogota.”
Chavez said that Ecuadoran military forces had also been mobilized and were moving north toward the Colombian border.
The raid Saturday by Colombia on a rebel jungle camp killed Raul Reyes, second-in-command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest leftist rebel group.
An indignant Ecuador government complained that the raid violated its territorial sovereignty, and also recalled the country's ambassador to Bogota, warning that Colombia's actions might result in “ultimate consequences.”
Correa also canceled a visit to Cuba to deal with the crisis at home, while Ecuador's foreign ministry lodged a formal protest with Bogota.
Colombia, for its part, insisted Sunday that it did not violate Ecuador's sovereignty, because its military operations one day earlier were taken for “legitimate defense.”
In a statement from its foreign ministry, Bogota added that it would issue a formal response to Correa's letter.
“Terrorists, including Raul Reyes, customarily have carried out assassinations in Colombia, and then fled to neighboring countries for refuge,” the response from Bogota read.
Reyes was in a rebel camp located 1.8 kilometers (a mile) from the Ecuadoran-Colombian border when the air force began bombing shortly after midnight, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a news conference over the weekend.
Colombian ground troops were then deployed into the guerrilla hideout to secure the area, Santos said. A total of 17 guerrillas and one soldier were killed in the operation.
“It is the heaviest blow ever dealt against this terrorist group,” Santos said.
Reyes, 59, whose real name was Luis Edgar Devia, was a union leader working for Swiss food giant Nestle in the southern department of Caqueta when he joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the 1970s.
Reyes had been viewed as a possible successor to the group's 77-year-old boss, Manuel Marulanda.
His killing was a major coup for Uribe, who has taken a tough stance against the 17,000-strong FARC, South America's biggest insurgency which has bedeviled successive governments since the 1960s.
It was the first time that one of the seven members of FARC's secretariat, or leadership council, was killed in combat.
Reyes's death came three days after the FARC unilaterally released four former lawmakers who had been held hostage for years, handing them to the Venezuelan government and the Red Cross in a snub to Uribe.
